[vox-tech] DE flame war.

[Karsten M. Self]

on Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 12:31:11PM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman (p at dirac.org) wrote:
> I was thinking of installing a DE on one of my computers.  Don't
> really know much about them.  Never really payed much attention.  I've
> always used twm or Enlightenment when I wanted eye-candy.
> 
> I plan on installing KDE on a test basis to see how I like it unless
> there are any issues why I should install Gnome instead.

Um.  Any reason you can't do both and choose the one you want?  Or
another WM/DE?
 
> Any compelling reason to use Gnome instead of KDE?

Yeah:  one of them fits your preferences, usage habits, and needs better
than the other.


Speaking for myself:

   - I use WindowMaker.  Light, fast, stable, out of my face, nice
     configuration tool, good existing keybindings, easy to configure /
     modify / add additional keybindings.

   - I've used most of the mainstream (and non-mainstream) WMs.  GNOME
     and KDE both strike me as annoying, in general, though for less
     technical users, they've got their place.  I'm partial toward XFCE4
     for newbs -- it's got a straightforward interface, is sort of Mac
     OS X-like, tends to be friendly.

   - GNOME works really well if you've accepted your role within the
     GNOME Gulag.  Of course, if you _don't_ feel that Havoc is the Font
     Of All Things HIG, you're going to find life a trifle...annoying.
     I find GNOME developer hubris to be grating in the extreme.
     Particularly the closed-loop logic refuting all user feedback:

       - GNOME's target demographic is non-technical users.
       - Non-technical users aren't qualified to comment on design
         issues.
       - Technical users aren't GNOME's target demographic.

   - GNOME has an alarming tendency to make like a supercharged VW
     Beatle on a ice-slicked Colorado mountain road:  continuous 360s
     until it plunges headline over a 1500' abyss.  The number of major
     direction/architecture changes the project's been through, and the
     willingless it's demonstrated to change allegiances (toolkits,
     target audience, design intent, preferred application set) makes me
     treat it like a rabid, pregnant, injured rhino:  with a great deal
     of cirucumspection but not necessarially with any intent to turn it
     into a favorite house pet.

   - Another remarkably charming feature of GNOME is the way it
     encourages the user to make fantastic journeys through unfamiliar
     territory.  Setting, say, MIME associations in your web browser
     requires firing up a sort of bastardized psychopathic cross-breed
     excuse of a file-mangler-cum-desktop-icon-manager, called Nautilus.
     Then it's merely a straightforward matter of a half dozen
     mouse-clicks, a newts eye, three waves of the rubber chicken
     (counterclockwise -- this is often omitted by the user and is
     contrary to the specs in the prior revisions docs).  Browser proxy
     specification is similarly conveniently located in another totally
     separate application.

   - KDE doesn't exhibit quite the same level of psychotic extravegance
     (is this what they call damning with faint praise), and indeed
     seems to have a few things remarkably well tought out.  Sean Perry
     made some offhand comments following a LUGoD presentation some
     years ago which suggest that its (KDE's, not LUGoD's) object-
     orientatedness was the basis for a certain level of sanity, such as
     the ability to embed access to various configuration utilities
     within separate apps:  the app developer needn't reinvent the
     wheel, and the user need not go traipsing across the frozen tundra
     in search of a setting.  Sometimes.  You'll need to cross a few
     swamps from time to time, though.

 
> I definitely don't want to run a display manager, and I'd like to keep
> Enlightenment as a wm.  I assume KDE can handle that....

You do realize, of course, that it's almost always possible to run an
application without any regard for its containing environment.

Except, of course, in the case of GNOME apps:

    http://bugs.debian.org/230756


Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    Reject EU Software Patents!                         http://swpat.ffii.org/
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